Morendo

This is not the spot                  where the plane

plumaged from the sky           to carve a cavity in the earth

Nor did I ever hear                  bagpipes in the Scottish village

notes never hung                     on the limbs like knots of hard walnuts

Never did birds echo how sweet the sound

and there never were              gray skies

gray ghosts threading the fields

never scattered wreckage

nor body bags 

This never was                        a town with ruins for houses

a pattern of death                    never traced on the Constable's wall

never a list of numbers           a bloody shred of passengers 

identified by how unrecognizable they were

There never was a knot           of bodies flying through the afternoon sky   

never a soft plot                      to bury them in

There were never families      kneeling         

keening

A son never                             boarded a plane

nor looked back 

A sky                                       never

emptied

a closed casket                        never

filled

perhaps there never was a hole in our world

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios' award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, and her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble by Word Tech Communications.  Nominated three times for a pushcart prize, she has poems published in various anthologies and journals including Stories of Music, The Poeming Pigeon, Love Notes from Humanity, The Blue Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Cumberland River Review, The Feminine Collective, The Ekphrastic Review, The Kentucky Review, Unsplendid, Edison Literary Review, Passager, and NILVX. She is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology. She is a Professor Emerita from American University and has spent much of her life performing as a singing artist across Europe and the United States.